Medicine

I once asked my mother (an accomplished seamstress) if she would embroider a sampler for me to hang in my bathroom, with the Latin expression "Cacatio matutina est tamquam medicina." She demanded to know what it meant, and refused when I told her. In English, the phrase means roughly "A bowel movement in the morning is as good as medicine." In other words, a crap a day keeps the doctor away.

Henerik Kocher's dictionary of Latin proverbs gives the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum as the source of the phrase, but I cannot find it in the Latin text.

Another text suitable for framing and hanging in the loo is a little poem composed by the precocious Gargantua (Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book I, chapter 13). This translation by J.M. Cohen relies heavily on the Urquhart-Motteux translation:

Shittard,
Squittard,
Crackard,
Turdous,
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
On us.
Filthard,
Cackard,
Stinkard,
May you burn with St Anthony's fire
If all
Your foul
Arseholes
Are not well wiped ere you retire.

Chiart,
Foirart,
Petart,
Brenous,
Ton lard
Chappart
S'espart
Sus nous.
Hordous,
Merdous,
Esgous,
Le feu de sainct Antoine te ard!
Sy tous
Tes trous
Esclous
Tu ne torche avant ton depart!

Saint Anthony's Fire is the devastating disease also known as ergotism, caused by the chemical ergot and found in rye infected with the fungus Claviceps purpurea. Rare now, it was once common, and the physician Rabelais was doubtless well familiar with it.

Laughter is also excellent medicine, and I prescribe chapter 13 of the first book of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, one of the funniest things I have ever read.